Digital lighting technologies, i.e. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications. Some of the fixtures embodying these sources feature a lighting module, including one or more LEDs capable of producing different colors, e.g. red, green, and blue, as well as a processor for independently controlling the output of the LEDs in order to generate a variety of colors and color-changing lighting effects, for example, as discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,016,038 and 6,211,626, incorporated herein by reference.
Technologies have been created to provide a serial bus for communicating lighting data for controlling addressable LED light sources. Furthermore, light strings which employ LED light sources (“LED light strings”), some of which employ one or more of these serial bus technologies, are becoming widespread. Current technologies include packages containing one or more LEDs, one or more current drivers, and one or more pulse width modulation (PWM) control circuits. This development enables the embedding of such addressable LED light strings in materials, e.g. furniture, textiles such as curtains, wall decorations, etc.
However, existing LED light strings do not allow for splitting of the strings into two or more forks. Especially in the case of an installation, e.g., in an embedded product, of a large number of LED light sources it can be a burden to devise a routing arrangement for the LED light sources by means of a single serial LED light string, or even a plurality of LED light strings all connected in one series path with each other. If the LED light string could be split, then a topology called a “tree” in graph theory could be enabled, thereby expanding the number of possible routings for the LED light sources.
Thus, there is a need in the art provide LED light strings which can be split into two or more forks and connected together in more flexible configurations.